Williamspurrrrg HD: A Game of Cat and Mustache is the first indie release of No Crusts Interactive, a studio founded by Dr. Carla Fisher that specializes in children’s and family games. She tells the tale of creating the game.

When people play Williamspurrrrg, my multi-touch, finger-twisting puzzle game where you put mustaches and other hipster gear onto cats, they tell me, “It’s so stupid, but I can’t stop playing.”

Then they ask how I ended up making such a game. The answer is that I had to put my money where my mouth is. Or, as my friend and colleague, Amy Kraft said, put my money where my mustache is…

Living By Your Standards

I frequently write and speak about making children’s games. One of my favorite things is to talk about games that are not made for children and consider how the technology or game mechanics might be re-appropriated in a child-friendly way. So while most of my work is consulting for clients, when I decided to do an indie game, it was clear that I had to step up to the challenge I so frequently presented to others – re-appropriate a game mechanic in a child-friendly way.

Two games I talk about a lot in this way are Slice and Fingle. In Slice, the player has to move knives out of the way in order to push a button. If a finger crosses the edge of the knife blade, blood splatters across the screen and the player loses. Fingle is also a multi-touch puzzler, but with sexual pvertones. While definitely not child-friendly, these games are excellent for fostering cooperation between players, largely because you have to talk in order to create a strategy for solving the puzzles.

Inspiration

Knowing that I wanted to make a cooperative game for kids to play with peers and parents, I knew I’d be using the multi-touch feature of the iPad to create finger-twisting puzzles.

The cats and mustaches came about during the brainstorming process. I was already thinking about cats, largely because I wanted to manage asset costs by using Creative Commons images for assets. Creative Commons is a method for the general public to release images for use by other people, under a variety of licenses. The attribution license allows you to use the image in commercial projects as well as to modify the image so long as you attribute the original artist. Flickr has a search feature that allowed me to focus on images released under Creative Commons attribution license.

I blame the hipster angle on living in New York City.

The working title was Catstatio, until my colleague and co-author on Kids Got Game blog Anne Richards suggested Williamspurrg, after the Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg, which is the mecca of hipster culture. I added a few more Rs, and set to work mocking up the game.

Production

Once I was comfortable with the design idea, I still had to build the team. Colleagues recommended programmer Peter Berry, and thanks to him, the multitouch puzzles play fluidly, even when ten fingers are touching the screen.

The artist, Megan Isom Smith, is a friend I met when speaking to a group of children’s magazine editors (My roots are in children’s magazines, and Megan is the art director for Ranger Rick Jr.). Megan shares my love for cut paper art, but as an artist, she actually creates it (whereas I am a strictly stick-figure on Post-Its artist.). She created all of the props from colored, textured paper, scanned them, and then further manipulated the assets digitally.

I owe the musical styling of Williamspurrrrg to attending a really fancy band camp in high school. A fellow cabin-mate from Interlochen Arts Academy in the 90s recommended Adrian Hernandez. If you’d like to get the music from Williamspurrrrg stuck in your head, it’s all online.

Lessons Learned

Production was actually pretty straightforward. We had the usual bumps, bruises, and schedule delays that almost every project experiences, especially when a new team is getting used to each other. So the things I learned are actually largely focused on what happened after the launch of the game in June 2013.

1. No One Can Spell the Name of the Game

How many Rs? Is there an H on the end? What about the letter S? Where does that go? And who is William?

I stand by the name of the game being key to the attitude of the game, but it’s also a massive hindrance. No one in Middle America, Asia, or large swaths of Europe understand the reference. I love the name, perhaps to a foolish degree. I recognize that it likely haunts sales, so I’m considering whether to release the game under another name in geographic regions outside the U.S.

2. I didn’t make a children’s game. I made a casual game that happens to be playable by children.

That’s a major distinction and quite an epiphany for me. Making a children’s game means a number of conservative decisions, like limited social media sharing (if any at all) or no in-app purchases (or heavily restricted behind a gesture gate that’s difficult for kids to navigate).

I’ve watched all ages play the game, from toddlers through the elderly. But it resonates best with teenagers and young adults (I should’ve figured that the absurdity of cats and mustaches would’ve spoken to them…). If I had this to do over again, I would be a lot more aggressive on in-app promotion and social media hooks. I’d likely have created Williamspurrrrg with in-app purchases and maybe even an ad network.

3. I started a new Web presence for Williamspurrrrg rather than running with the brand recognition I’ve built for No Crusts.

If I had thought about this, I probably would’ve seen this problem coming, too. The marketplace is so crowded right now that discoverability is a major challenge. In my consulting practice through No Crusts, I work with really well-known brands who have a fan-base, television shows, and multiple channels to push their goods. Others who succeed in the games industry have scads of money to spend on user acquisition and advertising or, most relevant to indies, they have successfully achieved a cult-like following. I liken this to the record label approach, which I talked about at 2013 Casual Connect USA and is archived online.

Record labels, authors, and even book imprints are great at creating a brand that people want to follow. If you were a fan of Def Jam Recordings, you knew you could buy any of their records and get a particular type of sound. A number of game studios do this really well. They engage their fans and keep them engaged by creating the same quality and type of content. They don’t start over from scratch with each new game, creating a new Facebook page, Web site, Twitter following, etc. They leverage what they already have.

I didn’t do this, though. No Crusts has a small but decent following on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Rather than continue to use No Crusts as the main social media identity, I started a new one for Williamspurrrrg — new Facebook page, new Twitter handle, and so on. That means I have to deal with updating a lot more places. I’ve pretty much abandoned the Twitter handle for Williamspurrrrg and use the Facebook page infrequently, unfortunately. It was too much to handle. It also presents a challenge as I prepare to launch a new game that’s not related to the intellectual property of Williamspurrrrg. I could create another set of pages to maintain or I can use No Crusts.

4. My marketing images weren’t helpful.

I had a riot making the first round of marketing images. We had some seriously focused hipster jokes. My favorite was “We were into multitouch before it existed.” There is a hipster-ism that they are in the know about trends and events long before they happen. Yeah, I know. It was way too esoteric. But the people who got the joke really liked it…

But I started to get feedback on the images, including one from a stranger that very clearly pointed out that my images weren’t working. The email said, “When I went to the Williamspurrrrg landing page, despite scrolling through all the images, I had no idea what the game was about, who it was intended for or even what genre it is. I only got some of that info after reading several reviews.” This was echoed in my conversations with people, so I’ve scaled back on the jokes and made marketing images with descriptive text rather than jokes. That was a tough pill to swallow. I’ve lectured countless clients on making helpful images. And then I proceeded to ignore my own advice and make funny images. Oops.

The Road Ahead

As a consultant, I rarely have the opportunity to design from scratch and own the entire process. Williamspurrrrg not only allowed me to get back to my roots, but also made me accountable for every step of the process. I’m incredibly proud of the game for that reason. The original vision was to make a game that kids and their parents could play cooperatively. There’s no questioning that’s the greatest success of this game so far. My next game will be released in October. It’s an endless runner with a new twist, which will hopefully continue making people say, “It’s so stupid, but I can’t stop playing.”

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